KKKAAARRREEENNNIIINNNAAA finds Charlemagne Palestine returning to Black Truffle with a document that compresses six decades of his search for the “golden sound” into one overwhelming performance. Captured in London in 2025, the piece places Palestine alongside two close collaborators of recent years: multi‑instrumentalist Daniel O’Sullivan and guitarist Oren Ambarchi. While Palestine is perhaps still most widely associated with the ecstatic piano clouds of his “strumming music”, his lifelong exploration of continuous sound forms has taken him across a wide range of media: carillon bells at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church, grand European church organs, synthesizer armadas at the Moog Sound Lab. Equally crucial is his practice as a singer, rooted in sacred Jewish music from childhood and expanded through studies of Indian and Javanese traditions in the 1970s. The album braids all these threads together in one towering, voice‑led ritual.

The work reimagines Karenina, a key piece from 1997 for falsetto voice and harmonium, originally recorded in Paris to honour the spirit of Palestine’s recently departed black labrador. For this trio version, which Palestine describes mischievously as the “karaoke” version, O’Sullivan takes charge of three cassette machines playing that original recording. As they drift slowly out of phase, the pre‑recorded voice chanting Karenina’s name and other trance syllables generates complex patterns of delay, ricochet and overlap. What might have been a simple accompaniment becomes a shifting vocal architecture: the tape voices slide across one another, forming blurry choral clusters and ghostly canons, an audible memory constantly re‑configured by mechanical drift.

The live performance grows from a single held organ tone that gradually swells to fill the frequency spectrum. Palestine’s electric organs unfurl long, glowing drones and more insistent harmonic figures, weaving a bed over which the cassette choir can hover and dissolve. Ambarchi enters with Leslie‑swirled guitar tones, gliding chords and his signature stuttering attacks that punctuate quieter passages with granular detail. O’Sullivan adds spaced‑out viola lines, synthesizer layers and additional live vocals, sometimes threading parallel melodies, sometimes thickening the mass with slow‑moving harmonic currents. Palestine’s live voice sits atop this assemblage: an extraordinary, shamanic performance that moves between keening cries, incantatory syllable chains and moments of melodic unison with his keyboard playing.

Although the work is unmistakably of Palestine’s design and fits squarely within his oeuvre of long‑form, ritualistic sound, Ambarchi and O’Sullivan are far from simple accompanists. As the emotionally charged stew of elements writhes and twists over the duration, different components surge forward, altering the piece’s balance without breaking its spell. In certain passages, O’Sullivan’s viola takes the lead, drawn out into spaced‑out waves that recall Takehisa Kosugi’s Catch Wave, bending time and pitch into a hovering continuum. Elsewhere, Ambarchi’s gliding chords and glitch‑flecked textures subtly re‑voice the organ drones, enriching many of the quieter episodes with an almost tactile vibration.

What holds everything together is the sacred aura that suffuses the piece. Palestine intones his hypnotic prayer for the soul of Karenina, the dog who first inspired the “magic song” nearly thirty years earlier. The layering of original cassette chant, newly re‑voiced organ and trio interplay turns that private mourning into a communal rite, a contemporary ritual where human grief, animal presence and electric sound mingle. The title’s extended consonants and vowels - KKKAAARRREEENNNIIINNNAAA - mirror the stretched syllables that form the performance’s spine, a name elongated until it becomes pure vibration.

Arriving emblazoned with a striking labrador painting by O’Sullivan on the cover, and framed within Black Truffle’s ongoing documentation of long‑form, exploratory music, this release stands as an essential slice of modern ritual sound. It is at once a memorial, a continuation and a new work: Karenina’s song, revisited with friends, amplified by machines, and set loose again in a room where every surface seems to hum with her name.